I thought exactly the same thing until a few weeks ago. Recently I tried a lot of DMs: the cool kids Pantheon, Elementary and Mint, the classics Gnome, Mate, KD

I thought exactly the same thing until a few weeks ago. Recently I tried a lot of DMs: the cool kids Pantheon, Elementary and Mint, the classics Gnome, Mate, KDE, XFCE and none of them were usable to me, they all have flaws (I won't detail this here but I talk mainly about usability flaws, not technical flaws). The closest thing to usable I found was XFCE because it was highly configurable, but it was hard and unsatisfactory. And then I installed Xubuntu. Their XFCE is really well configured and it REALLY is usable. For the first time I would consider suggesting it to a relative. As for me, even though I'm not a big fan of the Ubuntu base, I wouldn't consider using another distro than Xubuntu because they're simply broken both in terms of design or ergonomic. The only non-user-friendly I encountered so far with Xubuntu is it doesn't seem to support WPS out of the box. And it would be nice if xfce4-clipman-plugin was installed by default. Except for this, everything just works.